Complex sports outcomes almost never yield simple explanations. 5,000/1 to long shots don’t just happen. It was a confluence of reasons that helped deliver Leicester City its most unlikely of Premier League titles last season, reasons that can’t be explained away with a few anecdotes.

This season, soccer’s greatest underdog story has come to a screeching halt. The defending champions are yet to score a Premier League goal in 2017, they’re coming off its fourth-straight league loss and are languishing just one point away from the relegation zone. With those around them gaining steam and the team in total free fall, there’s a serious chance Leicester will become the first-ever defending Premier League champions to go down.

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There are all kinds of reasons for Leicester’s demise. A massive regression to the mean is the most obvious, combined with more games, the weight of expectations, some off-field issues and perhaps most crucially of all, the loss of one indispensable player: N’Golo Kante.

As For The Win‘s Nate Scott wrote last year, Kante was the engine of this team. The foundation. The reason it all worked. When he opted for a big-money move to Chelsea over the summer, the current Premier League leaders, he left behind a hole in Leicester’s team so big that it was almost irreparable.

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The Leicester City of 2015/16 and the team of 2016/17 are different, of course, but not as much as you might think.

Halfway through this season, its most-played starting line-up is almost identical to the one that played the most minutes last season. The only difference among the 11 players with the most minutes is the switch of the departed Kante for Daniel Amartey, his chosen replacement.

There haven’t been any major changes to the team’s style of play, either. It’s all sit back and counter attack, something borne out by the team’s basic underlying data. Leicester has an average of 44.8 percent possession this season, compared to 43.4 percent last season, and its passing success rate is still second-lowest in the league in the league (69.6 percent to 70.5).

The biggest difference — and, indeed, the pivotal one — comes on the defensive side of the ball.

(EPA)

Compared to last season, Leicester are making markedly fewer tackles (from 22.9 per game to 16.1 this season) and a ton less interceptions (14.1 per game this season, down from 21.6). The team that was first in both categories last season is down to 16th and 11th, respectively.

Leicester City’s opponents aren’t attacking them any more than they used to, basically, they’re just cutting through more. That, for a counter attacking team like Leicester, which depends almost entirety on a solid defense to springboard its attack, is a disaster. It undermines its entire basis for success, and it’s Kante’s absence that explains a big chunk of it.

Last season, Kante contributed a league-high individual average of 4.7 tackles per game and 4.2 interceptions. Amartey, who was expected to do the impossible as Kante’s like-for-like replacement, averages just 1.9 and 1.3.

The margins may be thin, but those three extra tackles and interceptions is what’s making the difference here. Add those 5.7 combined net tackles and interceptions back into the team, and the team is back in the top four in both categories.

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There’s brilliant moment in Moneyball which explains what went wrong for Leicester, and how it could’ve been avoided.

“The important thing is not to recreate the individual,” Lewis writes of Billy Beane, bemoaning the loss of Jason Giambi. “The important thing is to recreate the aggregate.”

Leicester City fell into that trap. They replaced the best ball-winning midfielder on the planet with a decent one and expected similar results.

(USA TODAY Sports Images)

Replacing in the aggregate would’ve meant sacrificing an attacker and adding an extra midfielder to mitigate for the loss of Kante. That itself wouldn’t have solved every problem, of course. There was always going to be a regression in other areas — this Leicester City team was never good enough to win the league, that was the magic of it — but get close to matching the defensive output from the year before, and a first placed team doesn’t transform into a relegation-threatened one. Rather, it’d be a first-placed team settling into mid-table, which is where we expected Leicester to be this time around.

Instead, the darlings of English soccer are serving as a devastating reminder for everyone else. They have problems everywhere, and no immediate solution to any of them. Leicester needed to adapt to survive, but instead, they chose to revert. All that’s left is a harsh case study of what happens when you remove the star of a one-man team.

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